But Wickenden discovered a far different side of this woman when she came across a forgotten folder of old letters.

The letters, written by Wickenden’s grandmother to her family in 1916 and 1917, described in vivid detail her extraordinary adventures as a schoolteacher on Colorado’s raw frontier. An avid correspondent, Dorothy Woodruff’s letters revealed not only the harsh conditions of life in the Wild West and the trials of teaching unruly young students, but also the contradictions of her upbringing as a rich society girl.

Fascinated by what she was discovering about her grandmother’s life and times almost a century earlier, Wickenden began some serious research, including several trips to Colorado to interview descendents of the friends her grandmother made that year. The result was a widely admired New Yorker piece, followed now by this engaging book, Nothing Daunted, which expands on her grandmother’s life as well as the history of the West.

As Wickenden explains, her grandmother was “a daughter of the Victorian aristocracy” who led a privileged life in upstate New York, graduated from Smith College and took a grand tour of Europe. Like other girls of her background — including Rosamond Underwood, her best friend since kindergarten — Dorothy was expected to return home to marry, and to marry well.

But Dorothy and Rosamond were bored by the young, eligible men they knew and the rigid social routines of their world. When they learned about two teaching jobs in Elkhead, Colo., they applied immediately. They were hired, and the blue bloods in upstate New York were shocked by the news. “Society Girls go to Wilds of Colorado,” the Syracuse Daily Journal declared on July 24, 1916.

Elkhead “was not a town,” Wickenden writes. “It barely qualified as a settlement. It had several dozen scattered residents, no shops or amenities of any kind, and a brutally punishing climate.”

Hired by Ferry Carpenter, a witty and idealistic young Harvard-trained lawyer and cattle rancher, the young women moved into a rustic cabin with a homesteading family two miles from their schoolhouse.

They agreed that Dorothy, unsure about her skills in Latin and math, would teach grades one through five, and Rosamond would teach six through 12.

Little did they know they would have to endure the worst winter in anyone’s memory, with temperatures often dropping to 40 below from December through March. In early December, Dorothy wrote to her sister that they had ridden by horseback to school in a blizzard. The storms continued without letting up through the entire month. At night, it snowed through the chinks in the logs upstairs onto the bed the two women shared: “many mornings they woke up under a coverlet of snow.”

Most of the students were so poor they had no warm clothes and often arrived at school freezing and crying. When Dorothy wrote her sisters asking for help, boxes and barrels of scarves and sweaters and coats arrived, along with so many books that the teachers were able to start a library.

What Wickenden found surprising is how well the young teachers adjusted to their harsh new life. They embraced it.

Their letters home focused more on the interesting, amusing aspects of their teaching than on the difficulties. Years later, they would look back on the experience as one of the best things that ever happened to them.

At the end of the school year, Rosamond married a man she met that year — businessman Robert Perry — and settled down with him in Colorado.

Four days later, Dorothy married banker and longtime boyfriend Lemuel Hillman back in her hometown.

In the book’s epilogue, Wickenden writes about going to Colorado for a memorial service for Rosamond, who died in 1974. (Dorothy died five years later, in her early 90s.) Several former students of both teachers talked about the lasting influence the women had on the lives of people in the Elkhead community. One of the most touching tributes came from a 64-year-old businessman who, as a poor child, had nearly frozen to death in Dorothy’s class before she supplied him with warm clothes.

“I’ll never forget the first morning when … the two new teachers rode up to the school,” he said. “I don’t believe there ever was a community that was affected more by two people than we were by those two girls.”

Wickenden is a lucky and talented writer. She has an interesting grandmother with an interesting best friend to write about. Both women spring to life in this wonderful book.